Tuesday, February 05, 2013

Senate Report Includes APTA Comments on Self Referral

APTA's comments to the Senate
Finance Committee's May 2012 request for input from health care stakeholders on
3 areas critical to Medicare and Medicaid reforms—program integrity, payments, and enforcement—have
been included in the committee's recently released report
titled "Opportunities to Curb Waste, Fraud and Abuse in Medicare and
Medicaid."

Specifically,
the Senate Finance Committee writes about eliminating self referral in 2
sections of the report. Under the Beneficiary Protection section, the committee
notes "concern that over-broad application of the Stark law exception for
physician in-office ancillary services compromises patient care by
incentivizing overutilization." The committee references "increasing
enforcement of existing laws, such as the Stark law" under the area titled
Enforcement.

More
than 160 stakeholders in the health care community submitted comments to the
Senate Finance Committee's request. During the 113th Congress, 6 Senators plan to work
with key committees of jurisdiction, the Government Accountability Office, the
Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General, and
interested stakeholders to develop a more detailed list of administrative
recommendations and potential legislative actions.

APTA's
comments can be found on the association's Self Referral webpage.

Comments

If you could stop all the Dr that own PT clinics and refer patients directly to themselves post op, and worse yet W/COmp patients (all the good paying patients)and give me just an even playing field, I'd double my practice in 6 months. Also, if PTs would stop working for the POPTs we as a Profession could stop this nonsense even if the Drs didn't comply. I'm praying!!

Posted by Jim Van Dyke PT
on 2/9/2013 2:46 PM

I agree 100% with Jim Van Dyke!!

Posted by Elliott Weiner PT
on 2/9/2013 4:09 PM

The secret to success in our field is direct access.
It is unfortunate that we as a profession are
not on the direct path to this goal. A required
Doctorate and residency program (or 5 yrs
Experience in the field) for every practicing
PT and the Physicians can no longer win
the battle nationally. Their argument is the PT's
do not have the education to safely see
patients without Physician oversight. Until we
listen to the other side of the argument, we will
never win the battle. Then eliminating Physician
ownership will be possible.

Posted by Nathan Saffels, PT, DPT, OCS, SCS
on 2/9/2013 7:55 PM

Nathan,
it is a turf war for physicians. Once the educational objections are no longer valid, there will be new objections to direct access. And quadrupling the cost of our education will only have further enriched the Universities and professors.